Tapering

As you approach an A-race you need to think about tapering. For B-races a two day, easy day recovery is sufficient. But for more important and longer races, you need to execute a bona-fide taper.

Up until 10 days out you can still train hard. If you are still "gaining" fitness, you should thrash yourself M-W this week.

After 10 days out you can gain no new fitness. At that point your goal is to gain full recovery and at the same time 1) keep your muscle memory good, and 2) keep your body chemistry balance correct. Many of you have gained your excellent fitness by either training a lot, or training hard. You may never have thought about how to keep your fitness while scaling back. In fact, many hardcore athletes are terrified of tapering because they think they will lose fitness...read this, think about it, and master it. Tapering is the final portion of training how you will bring out your best performance on race day.

Muscle Memory: You maintain muscle memory through frequent albeit short workouts. If you train 12 times per week, you should still do 8-10 workouts during your taper week. But if you normally train for 1-2 hours, during taper week your sessions should be 20-40 minutes. The closer to race day, the shorter. It is amazing how little training you can get by with and keep your muscle memory feeling good.
Body Chemistry: This refers to your body's ability to handle hard work and lactic acid. When you take a week off (sedentary) your body goes into rebuild and repair mode, but loses its ability to process lactic acid. The way to manage this during taper week is to do just a few minutes of race pace effort in each of your short workouts. If you are doing a half, it is Zone 3. If you are doing a competitive olympic distance, this is high 3-zone 4. The point is to do a few SHORT SPURTS, just enough to remind your body what it feels like to hurt.

Another component of body chemistry is the glycogen storage, hydration, and body fat composition. During taper week you are exercising less, so you should also reduce total calorie intake during this week. Eat the same number of meals, just scale back portion size. Up until 2 days before, it is okay to actually reduce carbs, again, because you are exercising less. Then on the two days before the race you should eat a high percentage of carbs. This means you continue to eat normal sized meals (or a little bigger) but you should be eating pasta, rice, and bread. This will top off your glycogen stores. Stay away from fat, and on the last day stay away from high fiber. You want your food to be processed and pass through quickly.

The reason I mention this is because many people become very distressed during taper week with the perception they are getting fat. This is not the case. You are storing extra water and glycogen, while at the same time sweating and exercising less. This is normal and it means you are prepared for race day. You want all your fuel sources for the race to be fully topped off on race morning, and this will feel different than during a normal day. You may feel slugging all week and even race morning. Don't worry about that. It is normal. It doesn't matter if you feel sluggish at the start of the race as long as you feel good in the middle and especially the end.